RAID best practice on UCS C210 M2

[Mingran Guan]

H everyone,

I  have a C210 M2 Server with LSI MegaRAID 9261-8i Card with 16 hard  drives of each 146GB.

If I am going to run CUCM, CUC and CUPS to support up to 5000 users, What is the best practice to configure virtual drives?

Do I need any hot spare drives?

Thanks.

[padramas]

Hello,

Please go through following two links

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/UC_Virtualization_Supported_Hardware#UC_on_UCS_Tested_Reference_Configurations

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Unified_Communications_Virtualization_Supported_Applications

I am not sure whether your hardware configuration falls under TRC or specs based and can support those many users OVA for all apps.

If it does, what I notice for RAID recommendation is

     2 drives for ESXi in RAID 1

     Rest of HDDs in RAID 5 

If it is specs based, you can configure hot spare for RAID 5 volume.

HTH

Padma

[Mingran Guan]

Hi Padma,

The UCS is ordered as UCSC-C210M2-VCD3 with

2 * X5650 CPU

6 * 8G Memory

16 * 146G SAS drive

1 * LSI 6G MegaRAID 9261-8i card (2 * Short SAS Cable for Expander)

So I believe it is C210 M2 TRC#1

Based on the Cisco RAID recommendation. is the below setup correct

2 drives for ESX installation as RAID 1

13 drives for VM installation as RAID 5

1 drive as HOT spare

I was wondering, there is only one RAID card in the server controlling all drives. What happen if the RIAD controller failed? any redundant on that level?

Mingran

[padramas]

Hello Mingran,

C210 M2 server can support only one PCIe RAID controller and we cannot have redundant RAID controllers.

Padma